Why Blogs Should Be The Hub Of Social Media Strategies

Facebook gets all of the love. With 900 million users, a ton of money coming down the pipe in a few weeks, and the world's attention focused on every move that Mark Zuckerberg makes, it's easy to understand why so many businesses are putting all of their eggs in the Facebook basket.

They shouldn't.

Here's why:

For Long-Form Content, Facebook Still Sucks

Blogs are far superior when it comes to posting a lot of content. While Facebook has multiple methods of posting long content such as Notes, it's a poor system for making the content look good. More importantly, people simply aren't used to reading long posts on Facebook. They're not in the right mode (or mood).

Instead Facebook should be used to send people to a broader message. Particularly in the case of creating a social media brand message campaign rather than (or in conjunction with) a press release surrounding an event or bit of news for the company, Facebook falls well-short of being able to deliver the message to the masses.

Instead, business owners need to be using multiple channels to get the word out. It's no longer enough to write up a good press release, pay a couple of hundred dollars to get it distributed to the big players, and then ride the wave of minor exposure it gives you when it gets picked up on Reuters or Yahoo News. These are nice, but social media is a better way to do it and it must start with the blog.

Blogs Are Controllable

Press Releases are not. Format, lifespan, exposure - through press releases, it's simply not realistic to try to have anything that can be sustainable. With a blog post (or series of blog posts) it's easy to make changes on the fly or in the future if things change.

The images and videos applied to blog posts can be made to appear more attractive and readable than leaving th data to mainstream media sites and hope they make it pretty.

This is your message. There's no reason to not have complete control over what it says.

Creativity Versus The Big Boring

Some people simply won't read a press release regardless of where it ends up being posted. They can read the headline, scan through the first paragraph, realize it's a promotional-style press release and move on to something more fun.

It would be hard to sneak in "a hippo walks into a bar" into a press release, but that may be exactly what's necessary to make a piece of content go viral.

The Process

Start with your blog. It's your hub. Then post additional, unique, supporting content to other blogs or sites you have access to if possible. If they aren't available, revert to Tumblr.

Making your blog the hub of your social media is the only thing that makes sense in a world where nearly every business is doing something or another directly on Facebook. The social networks should be tools to support the blog, not the end destination.